Berlin is dead cheap. Cheap flats, cheap office space, several universities with CS programs, a laid-back life style, good living quality in many of the inner districts.
Berlin! Berlin is by far the cheapest capital in Western Europe. You can get a nice sit down meal in a restaurant for 5-6 euros in the center of the city and rent a nice apartment for 500 euros a month.
There is a large tech scene and everyone speaks english here. It's sometimes hard to practice German because English is so common!
Warsaw.
Own 25 m2 flat: 600 usd
Cheap meals and fair price in good restaurants.
Best in Europe public transport 25 usd/m.
In general more than half cheaper than Berlin.
There are a lot of jobs in tech, but they mostly seem to be small companies trying to pay little. So to get by at 15€ a hour, you'll probably find a lot of offers.
Accommodation is cheap, I pay 400€ for 50sqm, a friend of mine pays 550 for 70sqm with 3 rooms. That's in a central part of town. In general, between 320 - 600 you can find a pretty reasonable place for a person to live alone.
Döner costs €2.50, a chinese meal off a stall costs €3.00, a restaurant meal in some small restaurant 5€ or 6€, in some normal restaurant maybe 9€ to 12€. Beer costs €3 in most clubs and bars, cocktails €4.50 to €8.00.
Transport costs €70 a month for the train? Not so sure about this. Parking is easy on the outskirts, but the very center of town you usually need to pay in a parkhouse.
Lots of english speaking people, and it's very popular for euro-immigrants (france, england, spain, etc), so a very western europe scene, and very easy to get by on english only.
Berlin generally has a bad work climate (I've heard people say), so if I were you, I'd apply for 10-20 jobs from Warsaw, then come over, stay a week in a ferienwohnung, do all the interviews and if you find one you like, move here. Moving without a job could put you under undue pressure. Warsaw is just 4 hours by train, is it not?
I believe there are a lot of young companies in Berlin, so I don't think the Airbus style jobs are really available here.
Berlin: One of the cheapest capitals in Europe, reasonably vibrant IT scene. Apartments inside the city can be had for as little as 300€ if you hunt long enough, although 600-700€ is becoming the new standard. Restaurants are cheap too: 5€ for lunch, 7-9€ for dinner. Lots of space, little traffic, the best public transport network in Europe, tons of lakes and green spaces.
I would add that "cheap" usually extends to some parts of the former West, namely Kreuzberg (quite a few startup/tech meetups there), Neukölln, and Wedding (not my personal favourite but definitely cheap), all of those used to be "in the shadow of the wall".
When we had a larger apartment and were trying to find people to rent one of the rooms for a few months, wg-gesucht.de was very useful, though that was a few years ago.
I agree Berlin is ultra-cheap, but the Nordic capitals are still pretty cheap compared to other startup hubs. When I moved from the US to Copenhagen, people warned me about expensive rents, but I was actually surprised at how much cheaper it is here than in major American cities. I pay about $1400 (€1000) for a centrally located 2bd in a nice area near the metro, which is a kind of price it's totally impossible to find in SF, Boston, or NYC. Not to mention in other startup hubs like London...
"(even cheaper than any Eastern European capital)"
That may be true if you exclude Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Bucharest, Sofia, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Skopje, Riga, Talinn, Vilnius, Kiev, Bratislava and a few more:
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp
Otherwise I agree with your 5 points. And Berlin is cheap in comparison with much of Western Europe.
You can live like a poor student in Poland for very cheaply but an upper/upper-middle class lifestyle (a couple of nice new luxury cars, always having the latest iphones/ipads, fancy clothing/watches/jewelry, a nice house/apartment in a good location, etc) will cost the same or more in Warsaw as in Berlin or Vienna.
Depending which part of the city you want to live, it is far from being cheap. But there are a lot of places where it quite affordable, but I am not sure if this suits everybody (travelling distance, "neighborhood").
I am partly living in Berlin for 4-5 years now and now moving there with my startup completely.
Copenhagen? I don't know how much real estate costs there but I doubt it's cheap. Last time I visited it was as expensive as Zurich (I.e. Double German prices).
It is affordable compare to London where the same thing it is probably 3 times more expensive.
There are other cities with more affordable prices (Athens) but obviously the startup environment is not the same there. But Berlin it is catching up with London, so it is worth to consider.
Probably true of locals of every city in the world but Berlin in particular is still very cheap relative to many western EU cities.
Numbeo cost of living index has it 153rd in the world including rent and it's well below places like Houston which is probably the cheapest large top tier city in the US.
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